There were piles of unopened letters on each of the desks, Doug noticed.
The letters were untouched, as if everyone was afraid to go near them.
Mike got off the phone, saw Doug, and hurried over. "Finally," he said.
"How's your boy?"
Doug nodded. "He'll be okay."
"Your wife?"
"All right."
"Good." He was holding a letter in his hand, and he handed it to Doug.
"Read this."
Doug looked down at the paper. Scrawled in smeared pencil was a simple sentence:
Your services are no longer needed.
It was not dated, it was not signed.
"We found this in the chiefs hand."
"Where -- ?" Doug began.
"Come on." Mike led him quickly into the hall and down to the closed office at the far end. "Brace yourself." He opened the door.
Catfieldwas in his desk chair, facing the door. He had been thrown back against the wall behind the desk and was staring at them. Or would have been staring at them had he had a face. For the shotgun proppedori the desk before him had taken off half of his head, including his nose and eyes, leaving only a twisted bloody mess of bone and tissue. Five or six remaining teeth grinned out of the grotesquely misshapen hole that had been a mouth. The diplomas and certificates on the wall were splattered with a Rorschach of blood and brains.
"Jesus," Doug breathed. He looked at Mike. "You waited to call me?"
"No," the policeman admitted. "But I didn't want to argue. We went over to the post office, found nothing. I have five men and six volunteers combing the town right now."
"Have you tried Howard's house? That's where he lives."
"That's where the rest of us are going."
"Let's go,'" Doug said. He closed the door to the chiefs office.
The mailman's car was not in front of Howard's house, but the convoy of two police cars and two pickups parked catty-corner in the center of the street just in case, effectively blocking off any attempt to escape. The house looked even worse than it had the last time Doug had been by. The paint wasn't peeling, the shingles not falling off, but the house's overall appearance was so dilapidated that it gave the illusion that they were. The lawn was a brown weed jungle.
They got out of their cars and moved forward, two policemen in the lead, guns drawn. No one came out of any of the other houses on the street, and Doug found himself wondering if their owners had left, were dead, or were merely too frightened to come out.
A policeman knocked on the door, rang the bell, called out for someone to answer, then used a device tojim open the door. They walked inside.
The interior of the house was completely dark, the only illumination entering through the open door behind them. The heavy unmoving air stank of festering decay. Doug put his hand over his nose to block out the smell. He looked around, frowning. The entryway seemed narrower than he remembered, the walls rougher and more irregular. He reached out to touch the wall next to him, and his fingers touched packed paper. "Jesus," he whispered.
Stacks of envelopes stretched from floor to ceiling, covering every available inch of wall space, completely blocking the windows. The envelopes were fitted so neatly and precisely together that there was no space between them; they effectively formed an inner wall to the house.
The rest of them waited in place while two policemen went out to their cars for flashlights. Doug's eyes gradually adjusted. He could see into the living room beyond, and he noticed that the furniture had remained untouched.
The couches and tables were not covered by mail, but the walls were concealed with an inner layer of piled envelopes, and in the center of the room additional stacks of mail had been used to form low shapes, sculptures, vaguely geometric, vaguelypyramidic forms.
The lights came, strong halogen beams that penetrated the dimness and brought to their eyes the enormity of what they were up against, the sheer single-minded craziness of the mailman. Doug stared at the letter walls, at the patterns formed by precise placement of colored envelopes and overlapping stamps. He was reminded of the Aztecs or Mayas or Incas, one of those ancient civilizations that had been able to fit stones together so perfectly that their structures were still standing today without the aid of mortar or cement.
They moved forward, slowly.
"Mr. Smith," Mike called out. "Mr. Smith, are you here?"
The house was silent save for their own breathing and footsteps. They walked through the living room, family room, dining room, kitchen, marveling at the completeness of the mailman's insane renovation. The horrible, putrid smell grew stronger as they moved into the hallway. Mike, in the lead now, pushed open a bedroom door.
And there was Howard.
It was clear from the strength of the stench, a sickening acrid odor of gas and bile and feces, that Howard had long since started to rot, but the signs were not readily visible on his face,. The mailman had crudely painted Howard's lips with a dark-red lipstick, and ineptly applied eye shadow ringed the postmaster's widely staring eyes. There were twin rose circles of rouge on his pale sunken cheeks. Howard's hair had continued to grow after death, and it was piled on top of his head in a feminine swirl, held in place by greasy perfumed mousse. His toenails and fingernails had continued to grow as well and were obscenely long. The mailman had painted them a bright red.
He sat in a chair in the center of the room, staring at a dead television set, the only other piece of furniture in the room. On the floor surrounding him were crusts of moldy bread, old Twinkie wrappers, and the bones of rats.
Mike took a walkie-talkie from one of the other policemen and told the patrolling officers what they had found, requesting that the coroner come to Howard's after he had finished with the chief.
Doug stepped out of the room and walked down the hall, through the living room, and outside to catch his breath. Even with his nose plugged he had been able to smell the rot, and his stomach had churned as he saw what had been done to the postmaster. Part of him had wanted to grab Mike and shake him and say, "I
told you so," but he knew that that was stupid and petty and that this was not the time or place for it.
He stood on the dead lawn, staring up at the sky, breathing. It was getting late. The sun was beginning to sink, the shadows to lengthen. In other towns throughout the state, throughout the country, people were settling down to dinner, talking, watching the news. But here such normalcy was merely a memory.
He felt a hand on his shoulder. Mike. "The patrols report no sign of him.
Do you have any idea where he might be?"
The creek, Doug started to say, but then he saw the thin sliver of moon hovering over the dimming horizon in the east. He remembered the mailman's dance of triumphant celebration. "I know where he is," he said, looking confidently into the policeman's eyes. "Get everyone together. Everyone. We can't let him get away this time."
"He won't get away," Mike said softly. He patted Doug's shoulder and went back into the house. Doug could hear his voice, though he could not tell what he was saying, and a few moments later he heard the sound of footsteps behind him as the policemen hurried outside.
The rocks of the ridge were orange in the light of the setting sun, the trees black triangular outlines. Venus had already appeared low in the west, and in the east the moon had risen, brightened. They drove up the narrow road slowly, in single file. Below them, the lights of the town seemed deceptively tranquil, benign, as though nothing out of the ordinary could ever happen in such a sleepy little community.
Doug drove with Tim in his pickup, and neither of them spoke on the ride up the ridge. The radio was off as well, and the only noise was the rattle and clatter of the track as it bounced over the ruts and washboards of the rough road. Doug looked in the side mirror and saw Mike and the other policemen following close behind in their patrol cars, the other pickup bringing up the rear. When they reached the top of the ridge, Doug toldTun to pull over and motioned out the window for Mike to follow suit.